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Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Mamdani’s vow to war on charter schools if elected NYC mayor outrages parents, advocates

 Socialist Zohran Mamdani plans to declare war on charter schools if he’s elected mayor, according to a survey he answered — sparking outrage from advocates and parents who called the frontrunner candidate’s views “very misguided.”

The 33-year-old Queens assemblyman said he would fight efforts to open more charters, which largely educate minority, working-class students, and even opposed the schools sharing space in city-owned buildings.

“I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City,” he said in a Staten Island Advance questionnaire before the June 24 Democratic primary.

Socialist Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani plans to declare war against charter schools that largely educate minority students if he’s elected mayor, according to a survey he answered.REUTERS

Mamdani’s hostility to charter schools, which are privately-run, publicly funded — puts him in sync with the United Federation of Teachers union, which endorsed him in the November general election following his primary victory over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and others.

But charter school parents and operators suggested Mamdani was deviating from his affordability agenda — touting he’ll choke off classrooms that educate mostly black and Latino students from working class and low-income neighborhoods he claims to be championing.

“I don’t understand why Mamdani would be hostile to charter schools. I think he’s very misinformed,” said mom Arlene Rosado, whose son, Mano, is a tenth-grader at the Nuasin Next Generation K-12 charter school in The Bronx.

Rosado transferred her son there because he was getting bullied at the traditional neighborhood public school, and she said he is now safe and not getting picked on.

“Charter schools are helping kids in the community. You should always have a choice. Taking that choice away is not cool,” Rosado told The Post.

The Rev. Raymond Rivera — founder of the Family Life Academy charter school network in The Bronx — said that Mamdani must support charter schools if he really cares about kids of color.

A Staten Island Advance questionnaire has the 33-year-old Queens assemblyman saying, “I oppose efforts by the state to mandate an expansion of charter school operations in New York City.”Stephen Yang

“Ninety five percent of children in our charter schools are students of color,” he told The Post. “We believe our parents should have a choice.”

Mamdani, in the SI Advance questionnaire, vowed to audit charter schools that are co-located in city Department of Education buildings, suggesting they received too much public funding.

“I also oppose the co-locating of charter schools inside DOE school buildings, but for those already co-located my administration would undertake a comprehensive review of charter school funding to address the unevenness of our system,” the survey said.

“Matching funds, overcharged rent, and Foundation Aid funding would be part of this audit as my administration determined how to manage the reality of co-located schools and legal entitlements,” Mamdani claimed.

Mamdani’s public view on charter schools strikes a similar viewpoint of the United Federation of Teachers union, which has endorsed him for mayor in the upcoming November general election.Stephen Yang

It’s not the only controversial part of his education platform — which also includes wanting to cede the mayor’s control over the nation’s largest school system.

Charter school advocates said Mamdani was a foe, not an ally, during his four years in the state Assembly.

“As a member of the Assembly, Mr. Mamdani has made clear that he was not supportive of charter schools or even the families that chose them, but he has recently and repeatedly said he would be a mayor for all New Yorkers — and that, of course, has to include the nearly 150,000 charter school students and their families,” said NYC Charter School Center CEO James Merriman.

Merriman said he wants to meet Mamdani’s team to correct “misinformation” about the charter school sector.

The Democratic nominee’s viewpoints on charter schools are a controversial part of his platform, while advocates call out Mamdani for being a foe to the charter school system during his time in the state Assembly.Stephen Yang

Arthur Samuels, executive director of the Math, Engineering, and Science Academy (MESA) Charter High School, argued charter schools are serving Mamdani’s affordability mission by providing a free education to struggling families who can’t afford to pay private tuition or move to the suburbs.

“I can’t think of anything more empowering to those families than providing choice and agency,” said Samuels, who is opening a second MESA charter school in Dyker Heights this fall.

There are 286 charter schools in the city serving about 150,000 students, or 15 percent of publicly-funded schools.

Students in charter schools typically outperform their counterparts in traditional schools on the state’s English Language Arts and math standardized exams. Most charters have a longer school day and school year than traditional schools, and their teaching staff are non-union.

Last year, 58.2% of charter students scored proficient on the ELA test — 9.1 percentage points higher than their district counterparts, 49.1%.

Meanwhile, 66.3% of charter students passed the math test, compared to 53.4% of traditional public school students. — a near 13-percentage-point gap.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio sought to stymie the charter school sector.

But a state law approved by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature forced the city to provide space to charter schools or pay their rent to operate in a private building.

The current Democratic-run legislature has opposed charter school expansion.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/06/us-news/mamdani-vows-to-declare-war-against-charter-schools-if-electioned-mayor-survey-reveals/

FAA issues ground stop for United Airlines flights at several airports around the country

 The US Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday it issued a ground stop for United Airlines flights at several US airports while the company itself said its teams were working to resolve a tech outage as soon as possible.

Two United Airlines planes on an airport tarmac.
United Airlines planes are seen at George Bush Intercontinental Airport on July 25, 2025, in Houston, Texas.AFP via Getty Images

“Due to a technology issue, we are holding United mainline flights at their departure airports,” the airline said.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration earlier said it issued a ground stop for United Airlines flights at several U.S. airports.

This is a breaking story. Please check back for updates.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/06/us-news/us-faa-halts-for-united-airlines-flights-at-several-airports-over-tech-outage/

Gen Z: Nationalists vs. Communists

by Adam Sharp

Young Americans are fracturing along ideological fault lines.

They are breaking into two camps. For lack of better terms, we will call them the far-right and far-left.

Unfortunately, there are few surveys which ask these kinds of questions. Pollsters still query along legacy party lines, Democrat vs. Republican, even though those labels are losing relevance.

Fortunately I have two teenage kids, and friends in the same boat. So I have a pretty good read on young Americans’ political leanings.

Most kids I know fall into one of two buckets. Let’s call them America First nationalists and hardcore socialists.

Girls are more likely to be on the far-left, while young men are increasingly right-wing. This gender divide couldn’t be clearer, at least in my area.

This shift to the extremes is understandable. Both sides are angry, and for good reason. The system isn’t working for them.

Young people today see a world in which they have no chance of affording a house. See the chart below, which shows how the average age of homebuyers has soared over recent decades.

image 1

The median homebuyer is now 56 years old! That’s up from 31 in 1981. Wages simply haven’t kept up with housing costs. The American dream is increasingly out of reach.

As kids, Gen Z was told to go to college and they’d get a 6-figure desk job. Now they’re graduating, often saddled with unpayable debt, into a rough market for new white-collar workers. Blue-collar workers are having less trouble finding steady work, but inflation is a pervasive problem.

The young left sees the solution in more socialism. The young right wants politicians to put America first and shrink the government. Both want to end corruption and tear down the status quo.

Strangely, on certain issues these two seemingly distant emerging political wings agree.

Increasing Nationalism

On both the left and the right, different kinds of nationalist sentiment is rising. Both right and left are increasingly against immigration, for example. For too long, mainstream politicians spurred immigration into the States. Broad support for this is ending.

And the more hardcore wings of each side are increasingly angry about America’s many foreign entanglements. They want the war in Ukraine to end. And Gen Z as a whole tends to disapprove of American support for Israel. This is in sharp contrast to older conservatives, who still tend to support Israel.

In general, young people want more focus on America’s issues, and less on the world’s. Again, this is completely understandable. Our youth is struggling, and they see trillions of dollars being spent overseas. Meanwhile our debt load continually rises.  It is politically and economically unsustainable.

Consequences and Direction

For the past 30 years, the left has dominated the culture wars. Think political-correctness, DEI, LGBTQ propaganda in schools, and immigration. Even mainstream conservatives gave way on these issues.

Now everything is changing.

The young right is on the rise, and the consequences of this shift will be dramatic and long-lasting.

A recent post by Robert Sterling on X summed up the situation perfectly:

The left has no idea the monster they’ve created with Gen Z men. Absolutely no idea.

These guys spent their formative years navigating an unprecedented social experiment—COVID lockdowns; DEI struggle sessions; pronouns, micro-aggressions, land acknowledgements, intersectional justice—and, as a demographic, they simply snapped. They stopped fearing cancellation, they realized black marks on social credit scores don’t leave permanent stains, and they started owning—rather than futilely trying to defend against—the accusations of villainry they had suffered since young age.

It’s a wholesale reactionary movement against a political system—more than that, a culture at large—which, rightly or wrongly, they see as dedicated to their emasculation. A system that, in their view, creates little of value, affords them scant opportunity, celebrates that which is ugly and mediocre and profanes that which is sacred.

From the fires of this crucible is emerging the most right-wing generation I’ve ever seen. And from the unhinged group chats of today are emerging the legislators and congressmen of tomorrow.

The left has no idea what they have done, and they can’t imagine what the second- and third-order effects of this will be.

Nailed it. Historically, major political shifts are driven by disaffected young men. That’s where we are with America’s youth today. Especially on the right.

President Trump is responsible for some of this shift, but I suspect the young right movement will eventually outgrow his brand of conservatism. Don’t get me wrong, Trump is a vast improvement from Biden and past GOP leaders. But he’s still too mainstream for these disaffected young Americans.

For the past 3 decades, mainstream Democrats, neocons, and RINOs had their way with the direction of America. This new generation will lead the way to change that.

https://dailyreckoning.com/gen-z-nationalists-vs-communists/

The American Academy Of Pediatrics: Mining Children For Profit

 by David Bell via The Brownstone Institute,

American healthcare is currently providing us with an excellent lesson in what capitalism looks like in the absence of a moral framework. The biggest losers are America’s children...

The Union Profiting from Childhood Sickness

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the major professional association of North American pediatricians, has overseen the rising rates of chronic illness and medicating of American children over recent decades. With 67,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, AAP distinguished itself during Covid-19 for its strident insistence that children’s faces should be covered and they should be injected with modified RNA vaccines, despite knowing from early 2020 that severe Covid-19 was very rare in healthy children. 

Funded by sources including Moderna, Merck, Sanofi, GSK, Eli Lilly, and other pharmaceutical companies, the AAP’s members are the cornerstone of the rapidly increasing pediatric pharma market in North America – by far greater than any other region. As a professional organization dedicated to ensuring income for its members, the AAP is like any similar professional association or union and acts in this manner.

The loss of trust in the medical profession since 2020 is fortunately removing the misconception that AAP-like medical societies were primarily altruistic, dedicated to the welfare of others rather than their members. The recent publication of AAP priorities, developed by its membership, should reinforce this loss of trust and so, despite its unusual callousness of approach, serve ultimately to strengthen public health by exposing more clearly the motivations of those profiting from rising illness.

Setting Priorities to Ensure Long-Term Profit

The AAP’s first stated priority is to remove parents from any authority when it comes to decisions on whether to inject their children with various substances produced commercially by its sponsors. While this should be ridiculous, it has some chance of succeeding as the ultimate beneficiaries, apart from pediatricians, are the same pharmaceutical manufacturers who heavily sponsor the election campaigns of most members of the US Congress.

Of relevance, promoting or abetting chronic disease in children ensures almost certain chronic disease through adulthood. The AAP is therefore helping to set up lifelong pharmaceutical consumers. Pharma companies are purely for-profit entities, and this is exactly what their CEOs and executives are charged by their shareholders with promoting. The AAP is simply acting as a very willing enabler.

The AAP considers that bodily autonomy is subservient to State-imposed requirements and that the post-World War II human rights of non-coercion and informed consent are subservient to the opinion of someone receiving money to perform an injection. Its approach coincides with the pre-War technocracy movement or medical fascism (in which a declared ‘expert’ decides on imposing healthcare measures rather than the patient themselves choosing it).

However, before discussing bodily autonomy and coerced medicine further, it is worth commenting on the priority list of the AAP overall, as it is fascinating, coming from a group that insists publicly on prioritizing the health of children.

Firstly, what is not there. Among the ten priorities of the AAP of which the elimination of parental rights or religious or cultural exemptions over vaccination of children is the highest, there is not a single mention of what are perhaps the three most prominent issues facing children today, and widely discussed publicly; increasing obesity and the epidemic of autism that the CDC heralds as of extraordinary proportions. While the AAP notes this problem elsewhere, it concentrates on identification and management rather than cause identification. Nowhere among its ten priorities is there any expression of interest in identifying and addressing the causes of rising chronic illness. The closest is a mention of lower costs for childhood insulin injections. The AAP’s priority list ignores diet and reducing levels of physical activity while actively promoting medicalization, seemingly oblivious to the quite catastrophic reduction in health status of the very populations they claim to be serving.

Unsurprisingly for a purely marketing organization, but inconsistent with a science-based healthcare body, the priorities include nothing regarding very obvious concerns of the impact of over 70 vaccinations, with their associated adjuvants and preservatives, now given to children by ten years of age. This number has grown from just a few 40 years ago in association with the deterioration in child health outcomes. The only interest expressed in vaccines is to remove choice from those concerned about such things, and force compliance. For a society of thinking, truth-seeking people this would be extraordinary.

Parents as an Obstacle to Return on Investment

The justification reported from AAP President Kyle E. Yasuda, M.D., FAAP for removing any remaining personal choice regarding prophylactic medical treatment (vaccination) is “the measles outbreaks” in North America in recent years. Jesse Hackell, MD, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Pediatric Workforce, notes that they were associated with the deaths of two children, the first in “many years.” The AAP simply states, regarding safety, that vaccines are “safe,” a stupid claim in medicine and biology in that adverse events do occur to injected organic substances and metal salts, and they vary from person to person (if rare events occur, then ‘safe’ is a relative term). Associations with recent DTP injection and sudden infant death are, for example, fairly well documented.

Regarding measles, it is likely that many AAP members mean well, but are genuinely misinformed regarding the impact of mass vaccination. In wealthy countries including the United States, nearly all measles mortality ceased before mass vaccination was commenced. This is not controversial – it was once stressed in medical school and is well established in national health statistics. An underlying improvement in nutrition, particularly in micronutrient deficiencies, was a likely reason. Mass vaccination then greatly reduced circulation of the measles virus, but could have only a limited impact on overall mortality. Therefore, weighing costs of vaccination (adverse events) against a very low likelihood of averting early death or disability is a real issue, and to ignore it by just reiterating ‘safe and effective’ is ignorant and foolish.

Measles vaccination is good at stopping transmission because it is very effective at preventing infections from being established. This efficacy is significant to the argument that having many vaccinated is a public good. Nearly all vaccinated people will be protected, and at no risk from the unvaccinated. Thus, mass measles vaccination really only makes sense if it is accepted that people should not have freedom to choose over their own bodies and healthcare, or that of their children. The very low measles mortality, far lower than drowning even before mass vaccination commenced in the United States, effectively removed an argument for overriding parental rights. Unless, of course, we are also going to ban children from swimming or walking near rivers or on a beach.

Lastly, regarding concerns over vaccination, many parents are uncomfortable with the role of cells harvested from induced aborted fetuses, often still alive at the time of harvesting. Again, many AAP members may believe the rhetoric that this is untrue, but nonetheless it is factual. It is how we derive cell cultures to develop many vaccines, so the DNA of these dead unborn humans can still contaminate the injection. The AAP, as an institution, officially holds that cultural and religious concerns arising from this should be overridden.

So, in the end, the AAP’s argument seems to come down to one of two possible drivers. 

Either (1) they have an ideological belief that they should simply be the authority or decision-makers on children’s healthcare rather than parents (a medical-fascist approach),

or (2) they see their role as promoting an extremely lucrative market for their sponsors, from which they also directly benefit, and setting children up for an entire lifetime of chronic illness and pharmaceutical consumption. It is challenging to decide which is less noble.

A third possibility is also possible. Most AAP members are simply going with the flow and have not actually stopped to think through the implications of their union’s policies. However, the motivation for willfully ignoring rational thought probably does come down to a mixture of money and ego, which goes back to the two potential drivers mentioned above.

Medical Fascism Should Have No Future

The AAP will almost certainly continue its path of child polypharmacy, blind adherence to protocols based on the products of their sponsors, and denigration and exclusion of the opinions of parents who recognize the stark reality of deteriorating health in North American children. Parents reading the AAP’s list of priorities would be foolhardy to then entrust their children to such care. Providing that politicians retain integrity and respect freedoms that most assumed were guaranteed in the US Constitution and through basic human rights norms, the AAP will fail in its endeavors and become increasingly irrelevant to public discourse. If they get their way, we will return further toward an approach we thought we had fought wars to overcome.

Fundamental rights of each human to make their own way in life, and protect and oversee their children, underpin any decent societal model.

In fascist societies, such decisions are removed and taken into the hands of experts and authoritarian institutions. The people must simply comply as slaves. Medical professions and their academies have a long history of supporting such approaches, and the AAP seems increasingly determined to replicate that path. It should receive all the respect that such an indecent approach deserves.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/american-academy-pediatrics-mining-children-profit